October 26, 2011

Like Madoff's Ponzi scheme, his suicide scheme did not work. The Madoffs woke up the next morning. In this botched suicide story, as told by Mrs. Madoff, she was "glad to wake up" but "not sure how I felt about him waking up."

16 comments:

Like the many "insiders" who were quite happy to use their upper class connections to get in on Madoff's "high return" investment schemes, Ruth was content to enjoy the (very) good life with Bernie while it lasted. No pity for her over here. 1% indeed.

According to the article, Bernie said that the thought of suicide crossed his mind, but two factors deterred him: he didn't want to abandon his family and he thought he could be of some use in helping his investors recover their money. Holy shit. This man can lie faster, better and more self servingly than a Clinton....I wondered how he could get away with such a monstruous fraud for so many years, but he must be like some kind of method actor who totally inhabits the part. There are no tells to indicate the con man hidden beneath this perfectly coiffed, perfectly respectable facade. The game is up, but he continues to carry on--the devoted family man and skilled financial manager selflessly looking after the interests of his family and investors. Balzac would not have sufficient imagination to make up such a character.

He just destroyed so many people among which were a lot of relative innocents - widows who were of an era to not understand anything about finances and just thought their husbands or other relatives had taken care of them well, etc.

My one sneaking sympathy for Bernie is that he apparently manipulated the status consciousness of the people he was playing above all else. That just cracks me up for some reason. It shows such enormous contempt stemming from his early years as the poor kid. There was no other reason to have done it. He was already as legitimately successful as anyone could want to be.

And there's a bit of a parallel motif with early 21st Century America - legitimately successful, couldn't cut it anymore, and started a con game (Greenspan and LTCM anyone?) and pyramid scheme that was supposed to be temporary, just to get it over the hump, but just grew more insane and intricate.

On the news this morning they said that the suicide attempt happened on Christmas Eve and I thought that the timing was interesting. The Madoffs are jewish so Christmas Eve wouldn't be significant to them but I assume that they hoped to gain something by picking that date.

Ruth Madoff had every chance to walk away from her husband when everything fell in, but she didn't.

Props to her for that, if nothing else.

And the suicide of her son was probably a worse punishment than anything the law could have doled out.

Yes. Compassion is good.

There is a tendency to treat the Madoffs as something other than ourselves--so rich that surely this scandal doesn't touch them the way it would touch us. They are so rich that they obviously don't have remorse for living the way they lived, so rich that they deserve everything they got. We see this attitude about the rich in the OWS people.

It is true that the vast majority of us would not commit the crime he committed, so that does set him apart. But I do believe that it is possible that he feels remorse, that he worries about what his crime did to his family, that the death of his son left him with a crushing grief. And Ruth...I cannot imagine the grief and terror she must feel. To be left naked like that, for the world to pick apart, to lose friends, to be unsure of the friends still here... unimaginable. I do admire her for sticking with him, though we have no idea what "sticking with him" looks like or feels like to either of them.